Why Cloud IT Helped a Small Telemedicine Company Meet Increased Patient Demand

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, demand for easy-to-access telehealth services skyrocketed. Luckily, Argentina-based Llamando al Doctor (“Calling the Doctor” in English) and its software development partner, Eudaimonia (Euda), could scale to meet the moment: They had already integrated Amazon Web Services (AWS).

We recently spoke with Llamando al Doctor Commercial Director Guillermo Gonzalez and Eudaimonia Project Manager Paula Ghidini about their partnership, and how the cloud helped them provide quality care to customers during an unprecedented time. Read on for examples of how small and medium businesses (SMBs) in the healthcare industry can improve IT operations in the cloud.

Scalable solutions with AWS

Q: Can you both talk a bit about Llamando al Doctor and its partnership with Eudaimonia?

Ghidini: Euda was requested to develop a technology implementation for the company, Llamando al Doctor, which aimed to connect patients and doctors through a video call service. This itself was already a major technological challenge since it was a medical and health-related issue. The high demand caused by the pandemic then added to this.

Gonzalez: We started more than six years ago…and we teamed up with our partners at Euda to develop an application that is simple, agile, dynamic, scalable and, above all, suitable for all technological profiles. The arrival of the pandemic changed absolutely everything related to medicine. We went from an absolutely face-to-face scheme to the need to contact our professionals virtually.

Q: When the pandemic began, Llamando al Doctor and Euda were poised to meet the demand for a virtual connection between patients and providers. Why was the business able to scale in this way?

Ghidini: From the beginning, our technical team came up with a technological solution based on an integration with AWS to automatically scale the application. This was very beneficial for us when the pandemic arrived and the demand increased exponentially due to COVID cases. The number of medical appointments in the app increased by more than 2,500 percent.

Gonzalez: The arrival of COVID forced us to meet an exponentially growing demand. This not only forced us to have a solid organization in terms of medical services, but also to have a large number of professionals in different specialties mainly focused on medical and administrative areas. Our efforts were focused precisely on this, thanks to the peace of mind offered by the platform we built with Euda and AWS support. Our product scalability and flexibility were not an issue, so we were able to focus directly on growing the business and meeting this demand, knowing that we were perfectly supported by our partners and our provider.

Ghidini: In addition, [Euda] had already used the services offered by AWS in other projects, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service, as well as Amazon CloudWatch to see logs and records of everything taking place and in order to find and report errors.

Q: How did this scalability help Llamando al Doctor become more competitive?

Ghidini: At the end of the day, the solution we developed had a direct impact on patients, on the people who were being seen who needed to have access to medical care. This was important in the context of COVID-19, where there was a lot of uncertainty and the traditional health services were collapsing. There were other similar platforms with huge budgets, large companies that had applications with these features, but they could not keep the service active due to high demand.

Accelerating growth and opportunity

Q: How else has AWS impacted Euda’s internal operations?

Ghidini: Internally, integrating with AWS services allows us to standardize our work and continue to improve our products for our customers on a daily basis.

Q: Does Euda plan to work on similar projects going forward?

Ghidini: In the future, we believe that we would be very interested in working on projects of this nature. With AWS we have the flexibility and stability we need to be able to precisely improve the quality of life for everyone.

Q: What aspirations does Llamando al Doctor have for the future?

Gonzalez: Our goal is to continue to scale nationally and internationally, while staying focused on our mission to democratize access to healthcare for everyone interested in it. 

Q: What advice would you give to other tech companies who want to build a vital, adaptable product?

Ghidini: A piece of advice that I would give to other companies facing a similar situation to ours is to always consider the quality of the final product from the outset, from building a good foundation to setting up the project based on microservices, so the product can automatically scale and handle any unexpected situation that may arise. Just as for any surgical intervention, it is necessary to have a staff of expert surgeons and certain tools to work with. We like to believe that Euda is the technical team using tools like AWS to be able to perform any surgery successfully.

Next steps

Llamando al Doctor and Euda have kept their solutions running with the cloud even as demand for services changed over the past few years. For SMBs with unpredictable IT demands, cloud offers the scalability and price controls that leaders depend on for efficient operations. Learn more about how we can help power healthcare innovations with AWS. Contact us to talk with an SMB expert who can coach you through your next cloud transformation project.